Clinics

Years after facing patient dumping allegations and hefty legal settlements, Southern California hospital executives have begun working with advocates for the homeless to improve the health of homeless patients and to reduce their use of area hospitals. Hospital administrators are driven by the national healthcare law, which offers incentives to provide better care at lower cost and imposes penalties when patients are unnecessarily readmitted to hospitals. Homeless patients are among the most frequent users of the region's medical centers, often because they lack regular medical care.

Police have evacuated a Veterans Affairs clinic in North Hills after someone reported seeing a man with a gun, police said. The sighting was reported at 8:42 a.m., police said. No one else has seen a reported gunman and a search of the hospital has turned up nothing so far, police said. The VA ambulatory care center at 16111 Plummer St. was evacuated before 10 a.m. The incident is the second at an L.A.-area Veterans Affairs medical facility in recent months. In April, the VA hospital in West L.A. was evacuated after a replica grenade was found on the premises.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is holding clinics over the weekend for consumers who may have been exposed to hepatitis through frozen berries sold at Costco. At least 30 cases of hepatitis A nationwide may be linked to Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend frozen berries, including seven confirmed illnesses in California by people who consumed the berries. One of those was in Los Angeles County, two in San Bernardino County and one each in Riverside, San Diego and Humboldt counties, health department officials said.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to allow Indiana to block Medicaid funding of Planned Parenthood clinics because they perform abortions. Without comment, the high court let stand decisions by a federal judge in Indiana and the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago that prevented the measure from taking effect. The 2011 law would have banned Medicaid funds from going to an organization such as Planned Parenthood whose work includes performing abortions. Judge Diane S. Sykes, writing for the 7th Circuit last year, said the state's "defunding law excludes Planned Parenthood from Medicaid for a reason unrelated to its fitness to provide medical services, violating its patients' statutory right to obtain medical care from the qualified provider of their choice.

When Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell was put on trial for murder, activists seized on the case as a symbol of all that is wrong with abortion in America, and used it to call for tighter restrictions and stepped-up oversight. But though Gosnell's behavior was deplorable, macabre and unquestionably illegal, it was aberrational, not symbolic. He has now been convicted, and he will be punished. This does not weaken the case for safe, legal and accessible abortion. Gosnell, a 72-year-old doctor who was neither an obstetrician nor a gynecologist (having failed to complete a residency in those specialties, according to a grand jury report)

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - Army Sgt. John Russell opened fire on U.S. mental health workers at a combat stress center in Iraq out of revenge after doctors said he was not eligible to leave the Army, prosecutors said Monday at the opening of Russell's court-martial on charges of premeditated murder. Five U.S. servicemen were shot to death at the Camp Liberty clinic in 2009. The defense claims that Russell suffered from chronic stress and mental illness that flamed into a psychotic fury.

For more than two decades, Wanda Remo has battled one illness after another. Asthma, chronic lung disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, depression, chronic pain, strokes. Specialists treat her lungs, her heart and her joints. Her litany of ailments brought her to emergency rooms six times last year, between numerous additional visits to a federally subsidized health clinic in South Los Angeles. "You are one of the million-dollar patients," her doctor, Derrick Butler, tells the 57-year-old as she leans on her walker during one appointment.

Less than two weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, several Los Angeles County hospitals and clinics conducted a disaster drill to test whether healthcare officials are prepared for such an emergency. At Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center San Pedro, organizers simulated a bomb in the parking structure that resulted in several pretend deaths and dozens of fake injuries, including internal bleeding, bone fractures and an amputation. Hospital employees and nursing students wore detailed makeup to look as though they were injured, and employees quickly set up a triage area with red, yellow and green tarps.

Science and Food: On Thursday, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard will be heading to UCLA where she, along with chef David Binkle, director of food services for the L.A. Unified School District, and Dr. Wendy Slusser, professor of pediatrics at UCLA, will discuss school lunches and edible gardens at “Edible Education,” the second event in UCLA's "Science and Food" public lecture series. The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. at Royce Hall Auditorium. Tickets are $25 and available online or at the UCLA Central Ticket Office.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela's attorney general said Tuesday that seven people had been killed and 61 injured in post-presidential election clashes between police, supporters of newly elected President Nicolas Maduro and challenger Henrique Capriles, who has demanded a recount. Atty. Gen. Luisa Ortega Diaz also said that 135 people had been arrested since election results were announced late Sunday that gave Maduro a victory by 1.5 percentage points. Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, has charged that Maduro stole the election, citing 3,200 alleged irregularities in Sunday's balloting.